Arts Festival, Orientation & Mobility, Boikanyo and a Somali Peace Fellow.

Last Week

Edward Selematsela, Helena Hugo and Paul Botes

It was a social meeting enlivened by the  visit by the artists who have donated paintings for the Arts Festival Raffle.  They are all well known to us and the biggest sellers at the Festival so we are really delighted by that they have been so generous in providing an amazing Raffle Carrot.  
Now all we have to do is sell the tickets!  Lenore Terreblanche is issuing the sheets and they are all numbered.


 Another surprise was a certificate presented to us by the SA Guide Dogs Association for our support with training sighted people at The College of Orientation and Mobility.  These people then return to the rural areas where they teach non-sighted people in the use of white canes and generally assist them with coping with their disability.
Roger Lloyd received the certificate on our behalf and handed it over during the meeting.  He has been a champion for the College of Orientation and Mobility ever since the club sponsored a guide dog.  He then realised that white cane training was money better spent as many more people would benefit.

This Week
Our speaker is Marilyn Bassin of Boikanyo - the Dion Herson Foundation.  Marilyn started the Foundation two years after she began volunteering at CP Clinic at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in January 2009. Whilst there she saw the desperate  need for disability equipment.

In 2011 Boikanyo the Dion Herson Foundation was established, essentially to fund equipment for disabled children who waited years for wheelchairs etc. Other wards got to hear of the equipment and assistance and began calling for assistance, Marilyn organised to buy equipment which afforded children to go home to mom- and- love, pressure prevention equipment, seating equipment and much more. Burnt, maimed, disabled, amputees, children with tracheostomies who lived for years at the hospital, hydrocephalic children, abandoned, raped, abused, bitten etc- in various paediatric wards received assistance. No one was turned away.Funding for two children to have surgery in a private hospital to close up a tracheostomy was arranged as well.

She met Riaz Simjee and together they ran a very successful Muslim / Jewish Interfaith teenage volunteer group –together the teens changed not only countless children’s lives at the hospital with their acts of goodwill, but also their own misconceptions about one another. This valuable humanitarian work lasted only until early in 2012 when the NGO was made unwelcome at the hospital, the CEO felt that our intention was to make Bara ‘look bad’. A complaint was laid with the SAHRC, they mediated but Boikanyo was not able to negotiate re entry into the hospital until years later, In 2012 the NGO moved to Mapetla, Soweto.

Manitoba honors Rotary Peace Fellow for public achievement

Abdikheir “Abdi” Ahmed

By Paul Engleman

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Refugees who come to Winnipeg often end up living in areas that are predominantly inhabited by indigenous people. 

“Newcomers do not know much about the indigenous life and heritage and, without that knowledge, the first thing they encounter is people who are poor and stereotyped by the mainstream community,” says Abdikheir “Abdi” Ahmed, a 2011-12 Rotary Peace Fellow and immigration partnership coordinator for the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg. “Indigenous people may see immigrants as encroaching into their neighborhoods. There is tension between both groups.” 

Ahmed works to smooth relations, helping them see they have more in common than what divides them. “Integration is a two-way process,” he says. 

In recognition of his work, Ahmed received the Order of the Buffalo Hunt, one of the highest honours for public achievement issued by the Manitoba legislature, in January 2016. 

“I never thought what I was doing had this significance,” he says. “But I don’t look at what I have done. I look at what needs to be done to bring about better living standards for people.” 

Ahmed, 37, may understand the needs of immigrants better than most. 

Originally from Somalia, he and his family fled the conflict there and settled in Kenya when he was a child.

Abdikheir 

As a young adult, he moved to Canad

After graduation, Ahmed began working at the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba. 

He learned about the Rotary Peace Centers program from Noëlle DePape, a colleague who had earned her master’s degree at the University of Queensland, Australia, through the fellowship.

 After Ahmed completed his own peace fellowship at Queensland, he and DePape worked together to develop a curriculum for a summer course that they teach to high school students at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, part of a Rotary District 5550 (Manitoba and parts of Ontario and Saskatchewan) program called Adventures in Human Rights.“We help them view the world from the perspective that everyone’s rights are equal and understand the idea of building a community where everyone’s rights are respected and each person is given a fair opportunity,” he says. 

In addition to his work in Winnipeg, Ahmed serves on the board of Humankind International, an early childhood learning center that he co-founded at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya with two Somali friends who also immigrated to Winnipeg. He says it serves 150 children with four teachers, and he hopes to expand it to accommodate the many children who have to be turned away. 

Despite the suffering he has witnessed and the daily conflicts he works to resolve, Ahmed is optimistic about the prospects for peace and the potential of the peace centers program. 

“My hope is that in the next 20 to 50 years, if we have more Rotary Peace Fellows around the world who are speaking the same language and taking on a leadership role to create an interconnected world, things will change,” he says. “I also hope we can find an opportunity for Rotarians and past peace fellows to collaborate on projects in a more defined way.”